I used to run my ipfwadm firewall kind of like this. I replaced INIT with an ipfwadm replacement I wrote that read ipf style rules from a config file and applied them to the kernel chains, then suspended. This was all on a ramdisk. It worked pretty well, although the ramdisk had to be replaced to change rules, which was kind of inconvenient.
It would be neat if this could be controlled by the user. Ideally, this would be done by a process signal. To actually cause a process to hibernate, a user would do a kill -HIB $PID or something like that. Then the kernel would save the process information to a file (somewhere under/var maybe?) until it is restored.
This next one would complicate things a bit: the user should also be able to wake up the process the same way, i.e. kill -WAK $PID. This means that an index of hibernated processes also needs to be kept synchronized between the kernel process tables and a file on disk, to be preserved between reboots.
I have two of them at work - they are great if you need to install a quick server in a cramped network closet. I am not sure how they are cooled, but they aren't loud at all, just a low hum (and hard disk noise, of course).
Oh, and all the hardware is very well supported under Linux.
I also work as a programmer/admin, for a small to medium size state university (about 10,000 users comprising faculty, staff, and students). I consider my job more fun than shooting co-workers with nerf guns (I get to play with big, powerful servers, write C/Perl/Shell scripts, etc.) In fact, this is probably the closest thing to a dream job that I could get. Co-workers are nice, my supervisor has a very refreshing attitude toward Linux and other Free/Open Source software, and, like yourself, I have a stable job with an organization that won't go under anytime soon. Even in the economic downturn, we are experiencing more growth and hiring more employees than I have seen the whole time I have been here. Most importantly, I have a real job. As someone else pointed out, it's no wonder all the dot-coms went under, if all they ever did was play with toys. (Plus, selling one's household garbage is probably a better business model than some of the ones that were out there.)
Most of these people aren't even aware they are running IIS on the thing, and have no concept of what it is to be an admin. Today I spent two hours on the phone with a CS major (I work at in a university IT department) whose pirated copy of Win2K Advanced Server was doing its best to eat our main webserver. He was completely unaware that his computer was doing anything different from usual, as his MP3 downloading and sharing was progressing at its usual rate. My first impulse was to bring the moron up on charges, deny him access to network resources for the rest of his college career, have him arrested for the DoS attack, etc. However, he won't learn anything that way. Instead, I pulled some strings with the Instructional Technology guys and got him a free pass into one of the Windows 2000 Administration training courses. Now he can learn how to use his computer, and possibly get himself a certification later.
Writing letters to elected officials is probably better than just standing by as the aformentioned officials are bought out and the downward spiral to a corporate police state is completed. However, this is no longer a viable solution. Your elected officials don't give a flying fuck about your vote, or all five hundred thousand votes from everyone who frequents this site. If they even see your letter. Some staff member will probably edit it into oblivion or simply throw it out. Face it, the corporations own the country now, and we don't matter.
Or do we? When you think about it, who are the half a million people who frequent this site? We are coders, system administrators, engineers, technical writers, etc. We don't do law and politics, we do C and Perl. The idiots trying to pass these laws may have forgotten, but we keep their networks protected so they can safely read their email, we programmed the traffic lights that enabled them to get to work to use the computer (that we designed and programmed) to draft this travesty of law. We are guarding all the doors, we are holding all the keys. We watch over them while they sleep. And we can give them one fuck of a wakeup call! I don't know of a computer in existence today that has these protections that might be required sometime in the near future. They need us to make this work.
By now you probably see where I am going with this. If the SSSCA becomes law, all coding to meet the nefarious ends of the law must stop. Fellow geeks: if your employer asks you to create this stuff, refuse, quit your job, whatever it takes. If it is impossible for you to quit your job (completely understandable) then you must be subtle. Pussyfoot around without accomplishing anything as long as you can. Then when you finally have to do it, code up such a buggy piece of shit that the whole thing has to be redone anyway. Etc, etc, etc.
Sysadmins, take the servers down, format the drives, and quit. You are probably holding tens of thousands of hours of work on your servers, and you are probably its sole guardian. Most companies who experience catastrophic data loss never reopen their doors. If your company wants to implement the measures described by this bill, threaten to destroy all of their data if development continues. Be clever about this. Set a cron job to do it anyway, so if they have you fired and arrested, it happens anyway. (Actually, this might be a bit drastic, we don't want to create anarchy, just kick some sense into people, but you get the point.)
Programmers, engineers, sysadmins, this is a call to action (or inaction, however you want to look at it)! The world depends on computers too much to risk pissing off the ones who control the computers and we don't have to take this lying down! Get the word out to geeks all over the world, and if this completely unconstitutional bill becomes law, then we will be ready.
All joking aside, the 2.4 series has kernel hooks for XFree86 DRI. At this point it is pretty new and only a handful of cards are supported, but it looks promising for getting some good fast 3D graphics support under Linux. And don't forget, NVIDIA's 3D drivers for linux require a kernel module to function, probably for speed reasons.
While it is true that graphics is not the job of the kernel, especially when running a server (WinNT's stability issues are a shining example of why this is bad), it is a nice option to have for Linux systems used as graphics workstations or for gaming, applications where you want to be able to squeeze as much performance as possible out of your video adapter. And for server class systems, where you don't need or want advanced graphics support in your kernel, it is a simple matter not to include those extensions at compile time.
Heh, that's a good one. Being as my personal home page is 100% cached/buffered templated PHP with a custom written news and forum system.
Guess I should have looked at your page before I posted (open mouth, insert foot)...that part was really directed at anyone who reads the comments, but sorry, anyway.
And you just know that their browser is going to have a convenient bug where the meta tag is ignored and the smart tags are always on anyway. My suggestion for webmasters: use some php:
if(strstr($HTTP_USER_AGENT, "MSIE 6.0")) {
   echo "This page will not properly display in your browser, get a real one." }
(If you don't know php, I think an explanation of this is still in the tutorial.)
At the university I work at, we use Command AntiVirus for the entire campus. We chose this over Norton's offering mostly for cost reasons (It has basically the same level of protection, but is pretty cheap). We have a site/blanket license where any computer on campus can have the software installed. It was very easy to configure the software to automatically download virus definition updates from our local Linux box rather than from Command, and automate the server to download the updates from Command every week (Our outgoing pipe isn't fat enough to support five thousand software updates every day). We started doing this about two years ago when we got an unexpected rash of Chernobyl infections and spent a week replacing motherboards, and we haven't had any problems at all with the setup.
Ottawa has two good FM stations: Chez 106.1 and 106.9 The Bear. Chom 97.7 in Montreal is pretty good. More music, less commercials. They do play some Top40 nonsense, but they don't play the same thirty songs over and over like most US stations do. Taking a quick look at these sites, at least The Bear and Chom have live streams.
I'm one of the current generation of 20-somethings who did learn a lot from computers growing up. I got started later in the game than you did - my first computer was an IBM PS/2. I disagree with you on your statement that programming on a modern system is a big learning curve. I don't think it is any more difficult than we had it, there is just no incentive to do it anymore. I think my PS/2 had DOS 5.00 on it, I don't remember, but when I turned it on for the first time I got the C:\>. I had to learn about the computer to use it effectively. Like you stated, if you wanted to do much, hacking was a necessity. A Win98 PC isn't like that, when the tasteless GUI comes up, it is pretty apparent what to do with it. Having to learn DOS to get my 286 to do anything useful contributed to my learning scripting languages, x86 assembly, BASIC, etc. I remember writing a menu system with.BAT files about a month after I got the thing so my father could run his programs easily. There isn't any real use for.BAT files or QBASIC programs on a Win98 system, though, and Microsoft doesn't give everyone VB (which, although I haven't used it much, seems less difficult than QBASIC was to learn). Even if MS did bundle VB with Windows, I don't think it would get used much, because the OS is so simplified that there is no need for anyone to progress beyond the newbie stage to use it effectively.
In short, I think Microsoft is responsible, not for computers helping our children to be smarter, but for reducing our offspring to drooling idiots when it comes to computing. This is why I advocate Linux on the desktop - because you have to learn about Unix systems to effectively use them, so Linux could bring hope of computer literacy back to our children!
Plex86 is Bochs. Maybe they are taking the emulation code out when running it on an x86 processor, but it doesn't run any faster (still performs like a 386SX/12 when running on a PIII 600 with 512M RAM). To be fair, it is still under development, and it does look very promising as a replacement for VMWare. Now, if it ran in console mode as well as in X (with an option to have it all in one executable or two separate ones, and a nice GTK+ (NOT QT!) GUI on the X part) then it would really be good.
It's amazing what you can control in this fsck'd up country if you have the money.
I knew a professor in college who had developed a workable engine that ran on anything organic (compost worked well). He was getting fabulously rich because a large oil company was paying him 1.8 million US dollars a year for the rights to the patent on the device (I think he gets the rights back in a couple of years, I wonder if anything will come of it then).
Anyway, how many innovations in this area have been squashed by Corporate America (tm) because something new coming along could put them out of business?
For movement, why not have something like a mouse turned upside down, only with lots of roller balls, that you walked on, kind of like a treadmill or something? And in Quake, the grapple is just another weapon anyway, you would have to just use the one gun for that, or rewrite the game (probably not too hard though, and I have often thought that the grapple would be better if separated from other weapons.)
Good idea, anyway, and a controller which is little more than a flashlight will hardly break your wallet, another plus!
I have never used OpenMail, so I don't know anything about it, but I do know that a mail server running a combination of sendmail and some IMAP service will work just fine with Outlook. I know from experience that if your servers adhere to open standards you will save yourself from a world of hurt. Sure, you might lose a bit of obscure functionality on the client side, but you will have far less problems in the long run.
Basically, let the desktop users have their Microsoft operating systems (for those who just want to use Word and IE, Win9x isn't too bad, although NT sucks for everything), but don't run one byte of Microsoft (or any other proprietary company's) code on your servers (the level of insecurity will scare you).
The story had potential, but it started sucking at the end of chapter one, and the whole thing is very badly written. This is essentially mediocre trash literature.
Your complaint about lack of shortcut keys brings up a point about the inefficiency of "modern" GUI's. You are absolutely correct, they cannot be called shortcut keys. What I do at work (where I have to use Windows sometimes) is just keep a DOS window open perpetually. I do everything in this window. This is the strength of the CLI, that it is very efficient for actually getting work done. As mentioned in another post, the GUI is great for graphics (irreplacable really) and word processing, etc. If you have a command line controlling a GUI (really nice in X), then you get the best of both worlds. A really efficient method of setting this up for Windows users is to change the SHELL=Explorer.exe line in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI to SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM (or to a PIF file, this may be necessary to get it to run in a window), that way you get all the functionality and none of the extra crap.
Power requirements cannot be an issue, as a motherboard can get more power from an AT power supply than from an ATX (Dell actually uses a hybrid connector on some of its boards that allows the board to get enough power from an ATX supply). And whoever thought the soft-power idea was a good one should be drug into the street and shot! Also, ATX cases tend to be cheaply made and pretty flimsy compared to AT cases. The positioning of components on ATX boards is better than on AT boards, though. If the soft-power "feature" is the only problem you have with ATX boards, it is pretty easy to circumvent it. Just get an ATX power supply with a hard-switch capability (I think PC Power & Cooling makes one) and put a jumper cap across the pins on your board where the power switch plugs in. Then it will act pretty much like an AT, although it may behave strangely if you try and power it off in software (just don't compile "power off on shutdown" into your kernel and you will be fine).
I took ADA from McCormick before he left my old university. Is he still playing with his model trains, doing real-time programming for them with ADA? I feel your pain with the structures, though. Don't worry, after school you won't ever use the language again (unless you work for Rockwell or the military).
Ada95 source code takes up twice as much disk space as C source! All joking aside, I don't use Ada because there aren't very many library bindings for it. GNAT is a pretty good compiler, though, and Ada fixes a lot of problems inherent in C, but Ada probably just isn't used because C/C++ are the established languages of choice for programming on Unix/Linux systems (most of the OS being coded in C).
While we're going back to DOS, let's go back to the 486, and see if the hardware manufacturers can do things better this time. Maybe we can get rid of some embarrassing things like Plug-n-Play (I actually WANT to configure my hardware with jumpers!).
It's mostly written in C++, you can tell if you disassemble it (I never did this, that would be a violation of the license agreement:) ). There are parts that are coded in x86 assembler (probably for speed). The funny part is that when you disassemble it, a large portion of it is just comments that say basically "if you can see this you are in violation of the license agreement".
Slashdot Mirror
I used to run my ipfwadm firewall kind of like this. I replaced INIT with an ipfwadm replacement I wrote that read ipf style rules from a config file and applied them to the kernel chains, then suspended. This was all on a ramdisk. It worked pretty well, although the ramdisk had to be replaced to change rules, which was kind of inconvenient.
This next one would complicate things a bit: the user should also be able to wake up the process the same way, i.e. kill -WAK $PID. This means that an index of hibernated processes also needs to be kept synchronized between the kernel process tables and a file on disk, to be preserved between reboots.
Maybe I'll write another kernel patch...
IIRC, Slackware used to be like this, around the kernel 1.0 period. Part of the install was the selection of options for the kernel for your machine.
Oh, and all the hardware is very well supported under Linux.
I also work as a programmer/admin, for a small to medium size state university (about 10,000 users comprising faculty, staff, and students). I consider my job more fun than shooting co-workers with nerf guns (I get to play with big, powerful servers, write C/Perl/Shell scripts, etc.) In fact, this is probably the closest thing to a dream job that I could get. Co-workers are nice, my supervisor has a very refreshing attitude toward Linux and other Free/Open Source software, and, like yourself, I have a stable job with an organization that won't go under anytime soon. Even in the economic downturn, we are experiencing more growth and hiring more employees than I have seen the whole time I have been here. Most importantly, I have a real job. As someone else pointed out, it's no wonder all the dot-coms went under, if all they ever did was play with toys. (Plus, selling one's household garbage is probably a better business model than some of the ones that were out there.)
Most of these people aren't even aware they are running IIS on the thing, and have no concept of what it is to be an admin. Today I spent two hours on the phone with a CS major (I work at in a university IT department) whose pirated copy of Win2K Advanced Server was doing its best to eat our main webserver. He was completely unaware that his computer was doing anything different from usual, as his MP3 downloading and sharing was progressing at its usual rate. My first impulse was to bring the moron up on charges, deny him access to network resources for the rest of his college career, have him arrested for the DoS attack, etc. However, he won't learn anything that way. Instead, I pulled some strings with the Instructional Technology guys and got him a free pass into one of the Windows 2000 Administration training courses. Now he can learn how to use his computer, and possibly get himself a certification later.
Or do we? When you think about it, who are the half a million people who frequent this site? We are coders, system administrators, engineers, technical writers, etc. We don't do law and politics, we do C and Perl. The idiots trying to pass these laws may have forgotten, but we keep their networks protected so they can safely read their email, we programmed the traffic lights that enabled them to get to work to use the computer (that we designed and programmed) to draft this travesty of law. We are guarding all the doors, we are holding all the keys. We watch over them while they sleep. And we can give them one fuck of a wakeup call! I don't know of a computer in existence today that has these protections that might be required sometime in the near future. They need us to make this work.
By now you probably see where I am going with this. If the SSSCA becomes law, all coding to meet the nefarious ends of the law must stop. Fellow geeks: if your employer asks you to create this stuff, refuse, quit your job, whatever it takes. If it is impossible for you to quit your job (completely understandable) then you must be subtle. Pussyfoot around without accomplishing anything as long as you can. Then when you finally have to do it, code up such a buggy piece of shit that the whole thing has to be redone anyway. Etc, etc, etc.
Sysadmins, take the servers down, format the drives, and quit. You are probably holding tens of thousands of hours of work on your servers, and you are probably its sole guardian. Most companies who experience catastrophic data loss never reopen their doors. If your company wants to implement the measures described by this bill, threaten to destroy all of their data if development continues. Be clever about this. Set a cron job to do it anyway, so if they have you fired and arrested, it happens anyway. (Actually, this might be a bit drastic, we don't want to create anarchy, just kick some sense into people, but you get the point.)
Programmers, engineers, sysadmins, this is a call to action (or inaction, however you want to look at it)! The world depends on computers too much to risk pissing off the ones who control the computers and we don't have to take this lying down! Get the word out to geeks all over the world, and if this completely unconstitutional bill becomes law, then we will be ready.
I think maybe they mean the Windows 3.1 emulation for OS/2.
While it is true that graphics is not the job of the kernel, especially when running a server (WinNT's stability issues are a shining example of why this is bad), it is a nice option to have for Linux systems used as graphics workstations or for gaming, applications where you want to be able to squeeze as much performance as possible out of your video adapter. And for server class systems, where you don't need or want advanced graphics support in your kernel, it is a simple matter not to include those extensions at compile time.
Guess I should have looked at your page before I posted (open mouth, insert foot)...that part was really directed at anyone who reads the comments, but sorry, anyway.
if(strstr($HTTP_USER_AGENT, "MSIE 6.0")) {
   echo "This page will not properly display in your browser, get a real one."
}
(If you don't know php, I think an explanation of this is still in the tutorial.)
At the university I work at, we use Command AntiVirus for the entire campus. We chose this over Norton's offering mostly for cost reasons (It has basically the same level of protection, but is pretty cheap). We have a site/blanket license where any computer on campus can have the software installed. It was very easy to configure the software to automatically download virus definition updates from our local Linux box rather than from Command, and automate the server to download the updates from Command every week (Our outgoing pipe isn't fat enough to support five thousand software updates every day). We started doing this about two years ago when we got an unexpected rash of Chernobyl infections and spent a week replacing motherboards, and we haven't had any problems at all with the setup.
Ottawa has two good FM stations: Chez 106.1 and 106.9 The Bear. Chom 97.7 in Montreal is pretty good. More music, less commercials. They do play some Top40 nonsense, but they don't play the same thirty songs over and over like most US stations do. Taking a quick look at these sites, at least The Bear and Chom have live streams.
In short, I think Microsoft is responsible, not for computers helping our children to be smarter, but for reducing our offspring to drooling idiots when it comes to computing. This is why I advocate Linux on the desktop - because you have to learn about Unix systems to effectively use them, so Linux could bring hope of computer literacy back to our children!
Plex86 is Bochs. Maybe they are taking the emulation code out when running it on an x86 processor, but it doesn't run any faster (still performs like a 386SX/12 when running on a PIII 600 with 512M RAM). To be fair, it is still under development, and it does look very promising as a replacement for VMWare. Now, if it ran in console mode as well as in X (with an option to have it all in one executable or two separate ones, and a nice GTK+ (NOT QT!) GUI on the X part) then it would really be good.
It's amazing what you can control in this fsck'd up country if you have the money.
I knew a professor in college who had developed a workable engine that ran on anything organic (compost worked well). He was getting fabulously rich because a large oil company was paying him 1.8 million US dollars a year for the rights to the patent on the device (I think he gets the rights back in a couple of years, I wonder if anything will come of it then).
Anyway, how many innovations in this area have been squashed by Corporate America (tm) because something new coming along could put them out of business?
For movement, why not have something like a mouse turned upside down, only with lots of roller balls, that you walked on, kind of like a treadmill or something? And in Quake, the grapple is just another weapon anyway, you would have to just use the one gun for that, or rewrite the game (probably not too hard though, and I have often thought that the grapple would be better if separated from other weapons.)
Good idea, anyway, and a controller which is little more than a flashlight will hardly break your wallet, another plus!
I have never used OpenMail, so I don't know anything about it, but I do know that a mail server running a combination of sendmail and some IMAP service will work just fine with Outlook. I know from experience that if your servers adhere to open standards you will save yourself from a world of hurt. Sure, you might lose a bit of obscure functionality on the client side, but you will have far less problems in the long run.
Basically, let the desktop users have their Microsoft operating systems (for those who just want to use Word and IE, Win9x isn't too bad, although NT sucks for everything), but don't run one byte of Microsoft (or any other proprietary company's) code on your servers (the level of insecurity will scare you).
The story had potential, but it started sucking at the end of chapter one, and the whole thing is very badly written. This is essentially mediocre trash literature.
Your complaint about lack of shortcut keys brings up a point about the inefficiency of "modern" GUI's. You are absolutely correct, they cannot be called shortcut keys. What I do at work (where I have to use Windows sometimes) is just keep a DOS window open perpetually. I do everything in this window. This is the strength of the CLI, that it is very efficient for actually getting work done. As mentioned in another post, the GUI is great for graphics (irreplacable really) and word processing, etc. If you have a command line controlling a GUI (really nice in X), then you get the best of both worlds. A really efficient method of setting this up for Windows users is to change the SHELL=Explorer.exe line in C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM.INI to SHELL=C:\COMMAND.COM (or to a PIF file, this may be necessary to get it to run in a window), that way you get all the functionality and none of the extra crap.
Power requirements cannot be an issue, as a motherboard can get more power from an AT power supply than from an ATX (Dell actually uses a hybrid connector on some of its boards that allows the board to get enough power from an ATX supply). And whoever thought the soft-power idea was a good one should be drug into the street and shot! Also, ATX cases tend to be cheaply made and pretty flimsy compared to AT cases. The positioning of components on ATX boards is better than on AT boards, though. If the soft-power "feature" is the only problem you have with ATX boards, it is pretty easy to circumvent it. Just get an ATX power supply with a hard-switch capability (I think PC Power & Cooling makes one) and put a jumper cap across the pins on your board where the power switch plugs in. Then it will act pretty much like an AT, although it may behave strangely if you try and power it off in software (just don't compile "power off on shutdown" into your kernel and you will be fine).
I took ADA from McCormick before he left my old university. Is he still playing with his model trains, doing real-time programming for them with ADA? I feel your pain with the structures, though. Don't worry, after school you won't ever use the language again (unless you work for Rockwell or the military).
Ada.Text_IO.Put_Line(Item => "Hello, World!");
-- OR --
printf("Hello, World!\n");
Ada95 source code takes up twice as much disk space as C source! All joking aside, I don't use Ada because there aren't very many library bindings for it. GNAT is a pretty good compiler, though, and Ada fixes a lot of problems inherent in C, but Ada probably just isn't used because C/C++ are the established languages of choice for programming on Unix/Linux systems (most of the OS being coded in C).
While we're going back to DOS, let's go back to the 486, and see if the hardware manufacturers can do things better this time. Maybe we can get rid of some embarrassing things like Plug-n-Play (I actually WANT to configure my hardware with jumpers!).
P.S. I'm really not joking.
It's mostly written in C++, you can tell if you disassemble it (I never did this, that would be a violation of the license agreement :) ). There are parts that are coded in x86 assembler (probably for speed). The funny part is that when you disassemble it, a large portion of it is just comments that say basically "if you can see this you are in violation of the license agreement".